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This week's review of the news begins with the two huge stories that broke Friday—the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse (which is causing grief counselors for leftists to work overtime again), and the House passage of Biden's so-called "Build Back Better" spendathon. The latter story may seem like a Biden/Democrat triumph, but in fact a closer look shows that this may come to be seen as the week when the wobbly wheels of the Biden administration began to come off completely.
Lucretia and Steve review the whole scene, starting with the reaction to the Rittenhouse acquittal, but then moving to Steve's theory about what the civil war inside the White House over Kamala Harris really means, and the warning signs all of this should be sending to Democrats. As Thomas Byrne Edsall advised in the New York Times, Democrats shouldn't panic right now—they should be "going into shock." (Ditto from Ruy Teixiera—another rare progressive who gets it.)
From there we survey the willful cluelessness of the major media, from the Times to NBC News, along with wondering whether David Brooks (actual headline: "Joe Biden Is Succeeding") has decided to become a parody of himself at long last. Also this week: Sen. John Kennedy has found a new "butthole professor" (Saule Omarova) to pick on, and the left immediately lit up the old McCarthyism bonfire. We round out this week's episode with some fresh schadenfreude over the meltdown of the College Democrats, and Steve's latest example of "social science" in the university today. (Plus some speculation about who is behind a mystery whisky that Steve likes.)
Steve Hayward
"Lucretia"
Discussion (4)
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Sad, if true, young Kyle declared he supports BLM... Oy!
(My preferred pronoun is LetsGoBrandon)
PODCAST HOST
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I heard an excerpt from the young man's comments to be broadcast on Tucker Carlson Tonight. He did in fact say he supported the goals of BLM, but tied it to real injustices in the criminal justice system of the kind that he had been subject to, i.e., that he also was the victim of gross prosecutorial misconduct. If the excerpt is accurate, then he did not really say that he supported BLM and all that it stands for, just the aspects of BLM that protest injustices we all abhor and as such it is not especially objectionable.
Let's Go Brandon!
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Thanks for another excellent podcast. The discussion about the relative worthlessness of journalism schools and education schools reminds me of the Bloomberg $500M. https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/06/msnbc-math-fail-bloomberg-could-have-given-each-american-1m-with-his-500m-ad-buys/
Mara Gay and Brian Williams both missed the huge mathematical error. One assumes that Williams’s staff also reviewed it. You don’t have to be innumerate to be on TV or on the editorial board of the NYT, but it doesn’t appear to hurt. 500 million divided by 327 million is not greater than a million.
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I have for decades now suspected that on any given shopping day, a majority of those shopping at Macy's are incapable of computing the final price of the $75 item that is on sale at 30% off.
It's common to hear learned people say with no sense of shame, "I'm terrible at math" (although often they mean simple arithmetic). What if they were to say instead "I'm terrible at reading," or "I can't write?"
Victor Davis Hanson has addressed this issue more broadly regarding the Millennial and younger generations. They don't know anything. Ask a 25 year old "what's the historical significance of the Battle of Yorktown?" "What's the Pythagorean Theorem?" "What is the cotton gin?"
If you're lucky, you'll get no answer.